My concern is that on shared hosting I am limited on what I can break...whereas on VPS, I could quite possibly accidentally take down our production sites which would not be good!

With great power comes great responsibility! ;-)

At $WORK we provide a sort of half-way house option which is a managed VM. We give the customer as much control as they are happy to have via ACLs and sudo (where required). This lets them do some configuration but without access to critical systems like /etc/fstab for example. We take care of the low-level O/S management and leave them to the bits that they want to monkey with which is usually at the application level. Since it's a VM they don't have the restrictions we have to impose on the shared hosting customers such as CPU and database limits because it's only their own systems which they'll be hogging. It's not to everyone's taste but those customers who do use it seem to really like it.

That sounds like a sensible halfway house hippo where is $work geographically located?

I may be interested but need hosting located in the UK, or at least within the EU due to data protection regulations.

We are located in the UK and presently all our VM offerings are also hosted in the UK (and thus outside the EU) for presumably similar data protection reasons as you have. It's probably best to send me a private message at this point if you would like to discuss this further.

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It's a valid concern. Usually I don't mess with 'production'. I have a parallel 'dev' system to mess with and only if tests are passed, a bash script (important: automate, by-hand there's risk of missing something) updates the 'production' scripts. I use a configuration file in order to specify the db-name (e.g. productiondb and testdb) and also the root/base url - so these must not be hard-coded in scripts. It is possible with a webserver like nginx to have parallel sites on the same machine. So you need just 1 VPS which you burden a bit during development time on the expense of visitors. There's probably a good-practices guide somewhere on how to do all these properly.

2ndly, I have already mentioned that a lot of VPS offer a snapshot feature (the one I mentioned earlier does) which takes a few minutes to snap the current state of your machine and unroll it whenever you are in big trouble (warning: that includes *everything*, including the DB-state, accounts+passwords at time of last snap etc. it's like re-installing the OS but at the state you last snapped it.). Cron jobs can automate backing-up your DB at regular intervals.

One last caveat: my VPS gets visited regularly by hacker-bots which check for known vulnerabilities (I mostly see php or wordpress paths they try to access). And also whenever I ssh it tells me that there were 20 failed attempts in the space of a few days. In the system I use I am responsible to handle both problems. And there are solutions. I don't know whether shared-hosting handles these problems for you with a blanket firewall.

hippo said: With great power comes great responsibility!. Sure, invest some time to acquire some skills if you don't already have them.